I admit it: I am a big fan of Google. I want to see them continue to succeed in transforming the Internet, as they have already done.

Their new offering, Google Plus (or G+) has the potential for being a major improvement on Facebook from several standpoints:

There really is value to the breadth of things you can do in a system. Google has been marching towards the goal of letting you move back and forth between various media or types of information, mixing and matching your content and your method of communications. I like this convenience and G+ adds another quiver to that set of arrows.

G+ Circles are the exact thing I want to do -- even if I post mostly to the circle that includes my friends from all walks of life. It is nice to know that I could send out a post to just my xBBN friends or my LexMedia friends.

G+ has a clean design. I value the thought that has gone -- and continues to go -- into Google products. Recently many of the Google services (GMail, GCalendar, etc.) have had a facelift making them a lot less cluttered and G+ continues this design simplicity. I have heard people say that G+ is too simple. I don't believe that simplicity can be a fault if you can get the job done.

The various types of media that can be included in G+ interactions are sophisticated. For example, this morning I started a photo album from G+. It was integrated in with Picasa and felt like I could do as much with photos as I can with the Picasa system -- which, although simple itself, is surprisingly good for processing digital photographs.

I keep hearing good things about the G+ video multiparty conferencing system: hangouts. I haven't tried it out myself, but I see great potential for use of hangouts as a tool for non-profits holding meeting and conversations, as described in this post I found this morning (http://bit.ly/qHiw7M). I am going to give this a try on the next such group I am involved in which is also receptive to the idea. I've learned my lesson: I won't try to use this with a group that is too big and too pressed for time to be bothered with something under development. But, I thinks this mode of communication is important for organizations whose members are distributed far and wide.

The part of the article referenced above that attracted my interest was the caution about why Michele Backmann attracts people and most importantly how reactions from people like me who belittle such sentiments can solidify and strengthen that support. Here is the excerpt that interested me:

Bachmann claimed that back in her college days, she was up one night praying with a female friend of hers when "the Lord gave each one of us the same, exact vision... It was a picture of me, marrying this man, in the valley where his parents have a farm in western Wisconsin." Meanwhile, miles away, Marcus "was repairing a fence on the farm where he worked, and the Lord showed him in a vision that he was supposed to marry me." According to Bachmann, Marcus initially complained to God that he wanted to see the world first, and only later relented. Snickering readers in New York or Los Angeles might be tempted by all of this to conclude that Bachmann is uniquely crazy. But in fact, such tales by Bachmann work precisely because there are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can't tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously. When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don't learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you're a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they're even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies.

A search of vaults at the Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple found a vast collection of gold coins, jewels and precious stones worth an estimated $22 billion. (http://nyti.ms/n1Eoso)

Makes the Walter Mitty in me sit back and wonder what it must feel like to be able to forget about such a fortune. How does this happen? It is because it was gathered from poor people by the smarter leaders of the temple who went to the grave knowing this existed?

One of our visits on our recent trip was to the Steamboat Arabia in Kansas City MO, a Steamboat supply ship that sank in 1856 in the Missouri River. An almost intact cargo discovered when the ship was unearthed 1988 gave a unique view of what was needed to help settlers from the east populate the prairie-- the types of household goods, farm implements, clothes, guns, etc. that a steamship would carry to the then edge of USA "civilization".

In any case, for me, treasure hunting has always been a fascinating topic to think about.

Google + Circles acknowledges that we don't have one set of friends, but rather have many sets of friends. In Facebook, I have not found easy ways to communicate with one of my circles and not everyone. It may be there, but such groups have not been well envisioned so that it is easy for me to understand who I am interacting with or switch from one to another.

I think Facebook managed to recognize the strong force of Friendships and have modeled the rest of the world in those terms. I hope that Google is thinking hard about Friendships, how people manage friendships, and how they combine friendships with the other aspects of their lives.

Why am I always attracted to root for the underdog? In sports, I certainly love seeing an upset. In business I am attracted to the new guy with he hope that he corrects the mistakes of the established organization as well as deflates the arrogance of the dominant player.

I have looked briefly at Google's own help and demo presentations about Google + (catchy name: a one character punctuation symbol. Google seems to have looked at the essential aspects of Facebook and taken the most important concepts (friends) and gone to the next level with what you want to do with friends (have conversations, find information (Google hasn't forgotten its claim to fame) share some information, have live video conversations, share pictures easily) as well as the most difficult aspects of Facebook (e.g., putting boundaries around groups of friends)

Over the next several days, I will post my reactions to various features of Google + as I learn about them.